O.C. mother bullies killer

Darleen Savoji jokes that someday, now that her kids are grown, she's going to finally get around to doing her baby scrapbooks.

And when she does, she's going to put together the other book dear to her heart: the one that shows the role she played in the weeks leading up to the arrest of killer James Crummel.

She now has the perfect newspaper clipping for the last page: Crummel hangs himself on death row.

It happened last week.

Savoji got a call from her son Johnny, now a student at Cal State Long Beach, telling her the news.

Her response was brief:What?

***

It was an ordinary day in 1997. Darleen's son, Anthony, then 12, wiped out on his bike riding through his Newport Crest condo neighborhood.

And, suddenly, there was James Crummel.

The man had a Band-Aid for the boy and invited him into his condo to drink soda and watch dirt bike videos.

Well, this time he picked the wrong boy to invite inside.

Because Anthony went home and told mamma bear the story of the nice man and mamma bear went berserk.

Darleen walked out of the garage where she was doing laundry and marched over to Crummel's condo to find out what sort of man invites a kid in to drink soda and watch BMX videos – because she certainly hadn't met one before.

There was no answer.

The next morning she checked her doorstep to get the newspaper and found a flier from the Newport Beach Police Department alerting neighbors that a high-risk sex offender was in their midst. It was only the second time in the history of Orange County that the brand-new Megan's Law had been tested.

Darleen showed her three kids the flier of the 53-year-old man at the breakfast table.

See, she lectured, this is exactly why when a man invites you in for soda you run the other way. So thank you for coming right home, Anthony, and telling your mom.

Mommy, he said, looking at the flier. That's the man who invited me in.

OK, breakfast is over, she told the kids. Off to school.

Then she marched back to Crummel's, a block down, with the flier in her hand and started banging on the door.

Hello? Hello?

As she was leaving, television reporters emerged from the bushes.

Who are you they asked?

I'm a mom, she said.

A mom who now had a mission.

“Looking back,” she says. “I don't know where I got the guts.”

As word spread, the media began gathering details on the crimes Crummel, a.k.a. Johnny Savage, had committed.

It wasn't pretty. His rap sheet stretched back to his late teens: Child molestation. Kidnapping. Murder. He went to prison more than once, but each time he managed to get out.

“A predator,” Savoji thought. “A monster.”

Fired up neighbors pushing strollers gathered at the condo pool to figure out a way to get Crummel to leave. But as increasingly twisted details of his past trickled out in newspapers, some protesters shrank away, afraid they or their children could become his target.

“I'm not afraid of him,” Savoji told herself.

Her home became Crummel Central. A core group of eight people painted signs, handed out fliers, knocked on doors, picketed. Then they held bake sales right in front of Crummel's condo to raise money to pay for the fliers and signs. TV vans broadcast live from the parking lot. Looki-loos lurked. Savoji used to scream at Crummel's home, calling him out.

“It was like a circus,” she remembers. “I saw him peek from a window only one time.”

As neighbors kept the heat on, multiple law enforcement agencies were working together to arrest Crummel. One case centered on some Big Bear molestations. Another case on a boy named Jamie Trotter who had disappeared after heading to school in Costa Mesa back in 1979.

It wasn't until 1996 that a skull found off Ortega Highway was determined through DNA testing to be Trotter's. Police went back to the old case file looking for clues and found that the man who originally “found” the skull back in 1990 had been none other than Crummel. He told police at the time that he had been hiking. They never did a background check on him.

As police worked behind the scenes, it also emerged that the man Crummel was living with at Newport Crest was Bernard Forgey, a Newport Beach psychiatrist who worked with troubled boys. And Crummel was not the first, or the second, but thethirdconvicted sex offender who, over the years, had lived with Forgey in that condo.

Savoji and the others took their picket signs to Forgey's office. They also tried to buy his condo from the owner, who happened to be Forgey's son. Instead of selling, Duncan Forgey served his dad with a 30-day eviction notice.

“We were a bunch of housewives that wanted to protect our kids,” Savoji says.

There were some, though, who saw the women as something close to vigilantes. “I got phone calls. I was threatened,” Savoji says. “I had to change our phone number.”

Three months after the Megan's Law flier hit her doorstep, Savoji got the call she had been waiting for.

“We got everything we need to arrest him,” police told her. It was going down in half an hour. Savoji phoned some members of the media and ran down to witness it.

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